All the dirt on DiRT 2

Rally car racing is a sport in transition. Like mixed martial arts, it’s spent the last several years carving out a slice of mindshare from sports fans eager for new spectacles. Rally has long been popular in Europe and Asia, and now has growing mainstream acceptance in America thanks to the late Colin McRae’s efforts to hitch the sport to the X Games. Now in its fourth year at X Games, rally has become the headliner that closes out the four-day spectacle. Known as a Super Special event in rally parlance, the races take the form of a head-to-head elimination tournament that showcase the drivers’ daunting skill as the course winds in and out of the stadium, from dirt to asphalt and back, with a huge, potentially devastating jump as the centerpiece. To use a possibly ill-considered alcohol metaphor, if NASCAR racing is a cheap American beer, then rally Super Specials are a shot of fine bourbon.

DiRT 2 fully embraces this new direction in rally car racing by integrating three adrenaline-soaked X Games tracks as the final stages in the single-player career arcs and offering them up for online multiplayer mayhem. We caught up with DiRT 2’s Lead Designer Matt Horsman at this year’s X Games 15, where we had the opportunity to try some four-player action and chat with rally star Ken Block about his involvement with the game. Watch the following interviews and gameplay to learn more about newest DiRT: